Simak’s ‘Desertion’ (1944) shows an attempt to cope with Jupiter’s hellish conditions by transforming humans into a form of Jovian life: ‘He had expected a hell of ammonia rain and stinking fumes and the deafening, thundering tumult of the storm. ’ For now, however, they lack the technological means to escape their world.Ĭlifford D. are the natural rulers of the Solar System. And because of the planet’s vast size and resources, ‘I tell you that the Jovians. In Isaac Asimov’s ‘Not Final!’ (1941) Jovians, made xenophobic by an ignorance of the universe beyond the cloud decks, regard humans as vermin. Campbell Jr., who insisted on scientific realism in the stories he published. The upper clouds might offer temperate conditions, but as early as the 1930s there were predictions that deep within the planet the pressures would transform a liquid hydrogen ocean into a ‘metallic’ form, capable of conducting electricity and generating a powerful magnetic field.Īgainst this background, from the 1930s more grounded Jupiter fiction began to appear, thanks to the influence of editor John W. Jupiter, over three hundred times as massive as the Earth but with a much lower density, must be made of the same stuff as the sun, and must have roughly the same composition: hydrogen, helium, and other elements in traces. In the twentieth century however the advance of astronomy gave us a more realistic framework to explore. With no more knowledge than that, much early sf treated Jupiter as merely an exotic, if larger, version of Earth. Clarke was not quite eleven years old when this was published.Īll we can see of Jupiter telescopically are the upper cloud layers, as painted by Paul.

Paul of the very first SF magazine he ever saw, the November 1928 edition of Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, showing astronauts on a Jovian moon hanging before the planet itself. It was perhaps Clarke’s last significant work of short fiction, and has been reprinted many times since – perhaps most notably as a terrifically illustrated serial in the short-lived magazine Speed & Power (IPC, issues 5–13, 1974), a rendition which made a significant impact on the imagination of a young Reynolds.īut Clarke said (in Astounding Days, 1989) that his own fascination with Jupiter began much earlier, with the spectacular cover painting by Frank R. It is a saga of the exploration of Jupiter’s cloud layers, with the intrepid Howard Falcon encountering aerial life forms dominated by the huge ‘medusae’. Clarke’s much-loved novella was originally published in Playboy for December, 1971. The Medusa Chronicles, my new collaboration with Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz, 2016), came out of a chance suggestion by Al in the course of a nostalgic email exchange: why don’t we write a sequel to A Meeting with Medusa?

Xeelee omnibus